Site speed quietly decides how many visitors convert — and how you rank on Google. Here's the data, and how to make your site load in under a second.
Speed is the most underrated growth lever on the web. Every additional second of load time measurably reduces conversions — and Google has made page experience a ranking factor through Core Web Vitals.
The good news: a fast site is entirely achievable with the right architecture. The bad news: most sites are slowed down by exactly the things that are easiest to fix.
The usual suspects
Oversized, uncompressed images are the number one cause of slow sites. Bloated page builders and dozens of third-party scripts come a close second.
Modern stacks like Next.js solve much of this by default — automatic image optimisation, code splitting, and static rendering mean pages arrive almost instantly.
What 'fast' actually means
Aim for a Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds and ideally a full load under one second on a good connection. At that speed, the site feels instant — and both users and Google reward you for it.
The payoff is compounding: better rankings bring more traffic, and a faster experience converts more of that traffic into enquiries.